A. Critical and Comparative Studies

13. Van Doren, Mark. ‘The Progress of Poetry in England’. Nation (New York) 112 (1921): 883-85.

The first work to note the general influence of translations of Japanese poetry on contemporary English verse. Two of the ‘four departments’ of important non-Georgian verse are ‘the translators’ and ‘the imagists’. Important influences from Japan are attributed particularly to the former: ‘Translation, so important for the food it furnishes to growing poetry, is at its most useful today . . . in a number of persons who work . . . with the brief, perfect poems of classical China and Japan. . . . It is not to Gilbert Murray’s heroic couplets that the subtlest poets are going to school, but to the finely cadenced prose or free verse of Arthur Waley’s translations from the Chinese and Japanese [see D26], E. Powys Mathers’s from the Chinese [and] Japanese [see D25] . . . and . . . Pound’s from the Chinese and the Provençal’ (see BK15, and, from the Japanese, BK8 and 13).